A Calendar of Tales & A Big Thank You

If you scroll down, you’ll find a hit counter at the bottom of this page. I placed it there a year ago this week. This blog has been up and running since mid-2010, and for the first two years or so I didn’t have that counter. I had no idea how many people were coming to the website, or whether I was just talking to myself. Last February I set up the hit counter to quell my curiosity.

Turns out there were more of you reading this than I thought. At that point I set a goal for myself: I wanted to see 100,000 hits in a year’s time. Is that a lot for a blog? I had no idea then, nor do I a year later. It was just a number pulled out of thin air, a nice round one with lots of zeroes. Never did I think I’d actually reach that figure. Imagine my delight, then, when I awoke this morning to find the counter had blown past that lofty threshold. Huzzah!

I knew it was getting close; I didn’t want to announce anything beforehand, because I didn’t want folks arbitrarily inflating the numbers. Hell, I don’t even know if that means 100,000 people visited the site once, or one obsessive person (my first stalker!) visited 100,000 times over the past twelve months. Either way, I’m chuffed.

My sincere thanks to everyone who reads or lurks here on the site. Feel free to comment; I don’t bite. Comments for blog entries automatically close after two weeks, as a way to keep spam bots from clogging my comments page. But they’re free and open to anyone before that time. And if you enjoy the material I put on the site, please consider picking up one of my books. I won’t mind, really. My novels are listed on the righthand side of this page for your perusal.

Elsewhere on the internets, Neil Gaiman has crafted what he calls a Calendar of Tales. He joined with Blackberry to create a project based entirely on suggestions from Twitter. Last week he released a series of writing prompts, one for each month of the year, then sifted through the responses to find the twelve he wanted to turn into short-short fiction. You can download the finished stories here.

But the project isn’t done. Neil’s currently looking for artists to provide illustrations for each month’s story. Interested? Details on Blackberry’s site.